There are major differences between the album I just posted ("Walkin' Down the Road") and this one. That one is entirely made of studio recordings, and all but one of them have been officially released. For this album, all the songs were recorded live in concert, and all of them are officially unreleased. It's a lucky break for me that I managed to find exactly an album's worth of music of these two types.
The reason this album exists is because in 1974 Clapton was essentially starting his solo career after many years of being in bands. (He put out a solo album in 1970, just called "Eric Clapton," but he didn't do any touring for it, and joined Derek and the Dominos to make the classic "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" album with them later that same year.) In 1974, not only did Clapton put out his first album since 1970 ("461 Ocean Boulevard"), but he started playing concerts around the time the album came out, and stayed busy touring for the rest of the year (and beyond).
While he was playing all those concerts, apparently he was still trying to figure out which songs he liked playing the best and which ones worked well with audiences. As a result, there are a lot of songs he played only a few times that year and never played again, and even some that he only played once.
Most of these songs are blues classics. One exception is "Smile," which was written by the famous comedian Charlie Chaplin, believe it or not. Clapton played it in most of his 1974 concerts, but never put it on a live or studio album at the time. (Eventually, a live version was included on some archival releases, but I chose a bootleg version due to it having good sound plus almost no crowd noise overlapping with the music.)
I've also included "Mean Old World." This is another blues classic. But the reason I mention it is because it was done by Derek and the Dominos in both acoustic and full-band versions. However, neither version was included on the famous "Layla" album. But the reason I included it here is because, in my opinion, this version is arranged and performed in a significantly different way than either Derek and the Dominos version.
Sometimes, I arrange songs by my feelings on a musical flow. But in this case, I decided to put them in the chronological order of the concerts they're from, since they're mostly blues songs and thus all fit together reasonably well anyway.
Luckily, Clapton's solo career was very successful from the very start, due to all his great reputation from his 1960s work, plus his number one 1974 hit "I Shot the Sheriff." As a result, there are lots of bootlegs of his 1974 concerts, including a surprising number of excellent sounding bootlegs. That means the sound is excellent for most of these songs, though some of them do some from audience bootlegs.
01 Don't Have to Hurt Nobody (Eric Clapton)
02 Bright Lights, Big City (Eric Clapton)
03 Smile (Eric Clapton)
04 Mean Old World (Eric Clapton)
05 You Don't Love Me (Eric Clapton)
06 Every Night about This Time (Eric Clapton)
07 Honey Bee (Eric Clapton)
08 Little Queenie (Eric Clapton)
https://www.upload.ee/files/16687956/ERICCLPTN1974_SmleLiveRarities_atse.zip.html
Since this is a live album, it makes sense to have an album cover of Clapton playing guitar in concert. But because I decided to name this album "Smile," I figured it would be even more fitting to use a photo of Clapton smiling. Luckily, I was able to find a good one of him doing that from 1974.
Thanks for this one. Did you forget a link for the Walkin' Down The Road post?
ReplyDeleteI did, but it's fixed now.
DeleteThank you.
ReplyDelete